LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

Website hosts offering hundreds of gigs a month. How is that possible? Perhaps I'm not doing the math correctly, but unless they have something obscene like a T3 connection, the pipe would be chocked with traffic.

Basically I'm taking with an associate of mine to switch from a shared hosting plan, and I just cannot compete with 3000GB bandwidth offerings, and I'm at a loss as to how to explain it. Can anyone shed some light on this for me?

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 8:48 am Post subject:

It's called overselling, and it is a common practice among the "low budget" web hosting companies. They know that most domains only have about 10 MB of storage and around 50-100 MB of transfers a month - well under what they allow.

Your typical server has about 250 gigs of drive space and is allocated between 1000-2000 gigs of transfer by the data center. That's total, for all accounts they host. If they have 500-1000 accounts per server, and each of those accounts actually used what they were "allocated", they would need several hundred times more than that. But, like I said, they know they won't do that.

The more reputable hosting companies won't oversell. They will only sell what their actual server limits will allow, thus insuring adequate service for all of their accounts.

If you have a choice, stay away from companies that provide hundreds of gigs of storage and thousands of gigs of transfers. This just means that their server will be severely stressed.

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 8:53 am Post subject:

It's the equivalent of walking into a restaurant and being told that you can eat 1000 hamburgers for $5.99, but you can only eat them by yourself in the restaurant and you have to do it within 1 hour.